Skittles - Taste the... Interwebs?

Social marketing is a giant experiment. Nobody really knows what they are doing or what they are looking to get in return, but everyone knows that to succeed on the Web today, it is essential to harness the power of world of mouth in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the other, lesser networks.

There's a standard pattern in these situations. Companies and non-profits are scrambling to integrate facebook and twitter with their web pages, and to offer token "interactivity" to gain a few more seconds of your attention.

But a few companies are taking the plunge, for better or worse, and devoting a large portion of their resources to social media marketing techniques. Take Skittles for example.

The google results for the search term "skittles" yield 3.81 Million hits, the first of which is skittles.com. The tag for their Web site is "Skittles.com - Interweb the rainbow. Taste the rainbow."

Interweb the rainbow? What?

Entering skittles.com gives you their new site (launched March 2), which is simply an overlay that sits in the top left corner of your web browser. It sits over the twitter feed for #skittles, the facebook fan page for Skittles, or the YouTube content from the skittles channel.

The potential for word of mouth is outrageous, but this strategy has flaws. Just a few days after launch, the Skittles site was deluged with profane tweets and the site had to be redesigned to make the Twitter feed less prominent. And of course, the major question is how Skittles will measure the ROI of this campaign. How do you track sales from twitter, facebook, and youtube?

In the end, is the Skittles strategy little more than an opportunity for every alcoholic twitter user to tweet out that they made skittles infused vodka?